I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working

by Shauna Niequist

Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing. It’s giving yourself credit for showing up instead of beating yourself up for taking so long to get there.

We find the courage to change when we feel loved. It unlocks our ability to move forward and grow.

Things break and then they heal, stronger for the breaking. But it’s absolutely okay to cry along the way.

That feels like the story of my life over and over—expending insane amounts of energy, frantic and fearful, while all around me people are yelling, “I think it’s going to be fine, pumpkin. I think you can stop kicking.”

A wise friend of mine says that true spiritual maturity is nothing more—and nothing less—than consenting to reality. Hello to here—not what you wanted or longed for or lost, not what you hope for or imagine. Reality. This here. This now.

I’ve been training all my life to pretend I’m fine and have let my body suffer for it.

I thought I needed a great army of friends, eleven sets of dishes, six pairs of boots, and two thousand books. I thought I needed an institution, a board of directors, a cozy blanket of like-minded, supportive people spread all over the country who would have my back in a heartbeat. Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A Kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.

Pain is pain and there’s no use comparing—in particular, there’s no use saying what you’ve been through isn’t bad enough. There’s no rating system, no Olympics of suffering. Dark is dark, period, but one way we distract ourselves from our own pain is by getting really concerned with everyone else’s pain.

I don’t know when the dawn will break, for you or for me, but I know that the healing comes in the trying and that even in the dark we have to keep practicing our callings, whatever they are. We have to keep doing the things we were made to do, the daily acts of goodness and creativity and honesty and service—as much for what they bring about inside us as for the good they do in the world. Those two things work together, and they both matter.

Resilience is, simply put, getting back up. It’s getting back up, not just after the first fall, but the ninth and tenth and seven hundredth. Resilience is feeling your exhaustion and choosing to move forward anyway. Resilience is watching your lovingly made plans fall to dust in your hands, grieving what’s lost and making (yet another) plan. It’s being willing to lay down your expectations for what you thought your life would be, what this year would be, what this holiday season would be, and being willing to imagine another way.

It’s okay to let yourself change, to let an environment change you, a city change you, a season change you. You are who you are, and also it’s okay to love one thing and then another.

Healthy, whole people don’t become healthy and whole on accident; it’s because they make the small, daily choices that build on each other.

One of my goals is to be a person who is easily delighted, who can find great cause for celebration in a fig or a familiar face. If you need fireworks and perfection in order to crack a smile, you’re going to be disappointed over and over when life fails to be spectacular on command. I want to live with an extremely low bar for delight. It takes almost nothing at all—a good song, a ripe piece of fruit, a perfectly packed tote.

You may be clinging to the past because it feels familiar and safe. But it’s gone, and you can’t go back. I’m sorry. I know. I tried too.

You decide who you allow into your life.

This is the question: What do we keep? What do we let go because it makes us lighter, because it opens up space, because it keeps us right in the moment and location of where we are, not yearning for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, a self that doesn’t exist anymore? And what do we keep because it’s part of the story of who we are, not just in this moment, but over years and decades, our essential selves?

If you think you’re too old to make a difference, you’re not. If you think you don’t have enough time left to build something really beautiful, you’re wrong. If you think your legacy-leaving window has closed, it hasn’t. It’s not too late for you. And it’s not too late for me. My grandpa was an unusual, opinionated, very tough man, and he began a life-altering journey right at the time when many people’s lives are nearly over. There’s still time. You can still grow into something beautiful. You can still leave something lasting and nourishing. It’s never, ever too late to grow.

I feel this truth reverberating through my life, because bricks and glass crumble and crack without that scaffolding from time to time, and human hearts crumble and crack too without deep work and intentional care. We only heal by investing in the difficult and ugly work, even if it isn’t pretty, even if it looks like a mess for a while.

Life doesn’t follow us. We follow it. We run after it, fight against it, catch up to it, make sense of it, get used to it—but it happens to us, not the other way around.

A few years later, here I am, realizing home isn’t singular, that you don’t lose one, but rather your world and your heart expand with each new home and new set of experiences, each new self and new street. The old ones stay, precious and tender, unlocked occasionally by a bite or a moment. And the new ones make your heart bigger and bigger, and your world bigger and bigger.

Oh, I feel that in my soul. Yes, and change course. Yes, and the future is different than you anticipated. Keep going, but keep in mind that all your plans and preparations just went out the window.